SEO has certainly become a buzzword in this day and age. Whenever you search on the internet or ask expert marketers about bringing organic leads, you get the advice to do SEO for your business. You may learn SEO yourself, build an in-house SEO team or go the easy route of hiring an SEO agency. Though hiring an SEO company might seem simple and clear, there are some important things to consider before you hire SEO Services Singapore. Read this article till the end to find out important questions you must answer before hiring an SEO agency.
Before We Start
SEO has one goal; optimizing your website for search engines so your business on top against your customers’ queries. SEO is a marketing strategy, and one plan may or may not work all the time. You should stay away from any company that promises to bring outstanding results in a given timeframe. Remember that there is no magic trick to hire on top within days. Otherwise, there will be no point in doing SEO in the first place. With that out of the way, let’s get straight to the all-important questions!
1) Your SEO Philosophy
You might have a rough plan or estimation of what benefits you will get after hiring an SEO agency. But here’s a thing; SEO is not all about fixing site errors or building backlinks for a website. Nowadays, several factors dictate the SEO-friendliness of a website. The three main facets of SEO are:
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
Technical SEO deals with solving technical errors that might be present in your websites. For example, flaws in your website code, crawling issues, 404 errors in your website, or redirect issues. Technical SEO requires a thorough understanding of how SEO works. On-Page SEO focuses on making your website user-friendly, easy to navigate, and including optimum keywords on your website. At the same time, Off-Page SEO focuses on bringing high-quality backlinks by outreach and guest posting methods.
So before you go on to hire an SEO agency, you have to review what your business wants the most and how you will execute it. Some SEO agencies only focus on Off-Page SEO, while only a handful of agencies can provide you with overall SEO assistance. Assess the needs of your business and make a learned decision.
2) Adaptation Of The Strategy
As mentioned earlier, SEO is not a lucky charm that works for everyone. Improper use of SEO like doing Black Hat SEO can even get your site penalized from search engines. Therefore, while building your SEO strategy, you have to understand your business needs and how you can achieve your goals. If you are a local business, you might have to focus more on a Local SEO approach. However, if you are running an ecommerce business, you might have to optimize your website for worldwide users. After you have an idea of what SEO approach is right for your business, you have to look for an agency that can fulfill your needs – be it Local SEO or E-Commerce SEO.
3) The Choice Of Metrics
SEO has one goal of ranking your website on top, but it depends on various metrics. For example, there are factors keyword optimization, site speed, backlink portfolio, and mobile optimization that affect your website’s SEO rankings. As mentioned earlier, no single factor can ensure the success of your SEO strategy. An agency might make your website suitable for mobile users, but it won’t ensure that your website is ranking on top. In other cases, you might have achieved your backlinking and keyword optimization goals, but you still have been struggling with your site speed. Identify a single or multiple SEO metrics that you want to optimize for your website.
4) The Time Frame
Achieving SEO goals is not a pipedream. You will not hire an agency, and they will show you outstanding results within a week. It’s because this is not how marketing works. Good things in marketing always take some time. The time it will take your website to rank on top of SERPs depends on your website and the goals you want to achieve. In case you work with an experienced agency, they might tell you that it will take around six months for your website to show results. But remember that if an agency tells you to give results within a week, staying away from such an agency is the best strategy.
5) Mobile Optimization
How you approach the mobile-friendliness of your website influences your SEO efforts. Many business models target mobile users for making sales. For example, a ridesharing company depends on mobile users to run its business. Such companies don’t necessarily have to optimize their websites for desktop users as their main focus is on mobile users. Depending on your business plan, you have to work with an agency that can help you optimize your website for mobile users.
6) SEO And Marketing
SEO is all about marketing your business effectively. SEO doesn’t only depend on stuffing keywords on your website or bringing backlinks in this day and age. SEO is part of a larger marketing strategy that includes faucets like Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, etc. In case you hire an agency that doesn’t have any knowledge about Digital Marketing as a whole, you are on your way to wasting your time and effort. You should hunt for a company that can align its SEO strategy with your overall marketing strategy so you don’t end up working with several companies at a time.
7) Proper Keyword Research
In the past decade, SEO was all about earning backlinks and ranking for some keywords. Marketers had this approach of picking a keyword and pasting in a keyword tool to get a list of low-competition keywords. Then this list was used for writing tons of blogs to be published on blog directories for backlinking purposes. But over time, search engines have recognized the importance of only showing relevant and informative websites to their users. “Search Intent” now dictates whether a keyword should be used in your SEO strategy or not. While getting quotes from different agencies, weed out the ones that don’t emphasize using “Search Intent” in keyword research and SEO.
8) The Link-Building Approach
Getting links is not a problem at all if we are talking about low-quality backlinks. Practices like getting backlinks from PBNs are all obsolete and may even trigger the system to get your site penalized from search engines. Several Black Hat SEO strategies in the market can help you earn thousands of backlinks within days. But these backlinks have no importance and can even hurt your website. While looking for SEO agencies, remember to work with ones that ensure you use influencer marketing for getting backlinks.
9) The Go-To Tools
There are several tools in marketing that can provide detailed insights about an SEO campaign. The SEO tools industry is so big that new SaaS products are emerging in the market, and the competition between them is very fierce. Keeping that in mind, it is important that an SEO agency only uses industry-standard tools for bringing results to your website. While doing interviews with different SEO companies, you have to keep in mind that the one you hire uses the right tools for researching and documenting the results. Ask them what tools they use for doing keyword research, checking rankings, and monitoring backlinks and why they don’t use any other tools than they currently do.
10) Documenting The Results
SEO is a scalable effort, and getting insights about whether you’ve made success or failed isn’t difficult. Therefore, while looking for a perfect SEO agency, you have to check their method for showing the results. You can ask a company to show their progress report they have made for a previous client. This way, you can check how serious they are about bringing results to their clients and whether they are result-oriented or not. You can also ask them if they report results on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis.
11) Keeping Up With Trends
SEO is not rigid as it used to be in the past. With more and more people turning to the internet for finding solutions, search engines are always active for uprooting any bad practices used for ranking on top of SERPs. This is the reason why Google, the most-used search engine, regularly rolls out updates of its algorithms. Each update is meaningful for people and agencies who are connected with the world of SEO. You should only work with an SEO agency that knows the importance of keeping up with the industry standards. Ideally, a good SEO company will follow the authoritative sites in the SEO space to stay updated about SEO trends.
Conclusion
SEO is a strategy, and there’s no guesswork involved in ranking your site on top of search results. You should never hire an agency that gives false claims about achieving certain results in a limited time. It is your responsibility to look for an SEO agency that asks you questions about your business goals, business model, and work ethic. Remember that working with the right company can skyrocket your business and help you achieve your goals the right way. Happy Marketing!